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By most rules of etiquette, a guest should not feel obliged to bring a host a gift. Still, one wonders: If Odysseus had presented the Cyclops with a collection of fancy soaps for the cave or theatre tickets to the new “Oedipus” on Broadway, would his crew have been served dinner instead of being served for dinner? And so here are a few offerings to appease your next host. (Caswell-Massey’s Sandalwood Explorer Soap Set for men, for $48, or the Farmhouse Artisan Goat Milk and Tallow Soap Sampler from Pretty Farm Girl, for $50.)

Caswell-Massey soap-bar set 

$48 $36

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Let’s start small. The mid-century-style working TinyTV ($60), about the size of a large marshmallow, has a crisp picture and comes with a tiny functioning remote. It arrives preloaded with a selection of TV programs, and you can easily upload more videos and movies onto the adorable thing. You know who’d love it? Barbie. The very best bite-sized umbrella is the Davek Mini ($65), weighing eight ounces and measuring seven inches when closed. If your friend isn’t worth that much, the Sy Compact Travel Umbrella ranges from $14, for what we’ll call Umbrella Black, to $14, for a canopy with a scene of a castle in a forest by a lake. Money’s no question and you want to make someone feel miserable about leaving his umbrella on the subway? The full-sized Snakewood from the House of Swaine is made of hand-stitched silk and has a handle fashioned from forty-to-seventy-year-old ebony wood “harvested” in tropical Africa, one suspects, by Carson from “Downton Abbey” ($2,470, and that’s not a typo; the $4,160 selection with the silver-plated band around the handle is sold out, which shows you how much some people don't like to get wet). To be nice, throw in a Davek Loss Alert Sensor that tethers with his phone so he can keep track of his umbrella’s gallivanting ($35). There may be vases more microscopic than the 1.9-inch-high pastel-colored glass vessels at the MOMA Design Store ($20 for a set of five, or $18 if you’re a museum member), but I can’t see them. To complete the look, pop in a parsley sprig or a doll-house bouquet of fake roses ($7 for a half dozen or so).

Davek loss-alert sensor 

$35

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Long after snow has vanished from the planet, there will still be snow globes. I’m charmed particularly by one in which a family of three topiary elephants weather the blizzard on a bed of daisies ($69; a portion of sales are donated to the charity Save the Elephants). In another, a quick shake turns three bare birch trees into a winter wonderland ($69).

Jellyfish paperweight 

$33

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Snow globes that stay put are paperweights. If your flyaway-paper problem is out of control, a translucent jellyfish in different colors can help ($33). Anyone with unresolved anger issues should stay away from this hefty crystal apple, which could moonlight as a wrecking ball ($50).

Even those indifferent to updated terms and conditions will appreciate L’Objet’s Gecko Magnifying Glass that makes fine print seven times less fine. The gold-plated lizard stretches its tail—a.k.a. the handle—as it crawls along the rim, en route to read the finest of print ($150). I won’t tell if you opt for the aluminum snake version ($50).

Kokedama plants 

$68

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In these polarized times, can we all agree that bringing a bouquet of flowers without a vase to a party is as inconsiderate and burdensome as showing up nine months pregnant and asking your host to deliver the baby? That is why a kokedama plant is the perfect present. Kokedama is the Japanese style of potting plants by encasing the root in a ball of soil and clay which is covered in moss—picture a cantaloupe dressed as a Chia Pet. The ball serves as the pot and can be displayed on a plate or hung from the ceiling. Minimal care is required—a few times a month, submerge the ball in water for ten to twenty minutes, then let it drain. There are some wonderful specimens to order at Bloomist ($58-$88) and Of Soil and Moss (starting at $48). Additionally, many florists sell them—for instance, there’s Moss and Green in Brooklyn, where you can acquire a Pink Quill that looks like a pineapple transitioning into a flower ($88). If you prefer a plant that leads a more sheltered life, Terrart NYC sells terrariums, including one inside a lightbulb ($50).

For the pet-lover who hates taking care of pets: a self-sufficient ecosystem containing two or three miniature unneedy shrimp that can live for years without much help from you. Along with the crustaceans, the four-inch-diameter glass sphere contains gravel, an elegant branch of artificial coral, and algae that supply oxygen and food—the perfect houseguests ($99).

Pot, protests, and Cher are back, so why not lava lamps? They were invented by Edward Craven Walker, a British accountant who made underwater nudist films on the side. Walker came up with the idea for the lamp in a pub, where he saw an experimental egg-timer contraption that entailed boiling a mixture of oil and water (when the oil blobs reach the surface, the egg is cooked). Mathos, the lighting company Walker founded in 1963 to manufacture his creation, still makes lava lamps. Among them: a slim column nearly ten feet high (£8,500), a tower that looks like a dolphin about to take off into outer space (£415), and a shiny copper-plated, candle-powered device that resembles a big pill capsule (£50). Mathos doesn’t ship to the U.S., and why go through the trouble of smuggling? Here in America we have groovy new ones that evoke elongated hourglasses and rockets (starting at $30).

Some letter openers are so appealing that it’s a treat to open your jury-duty notice and junk mail. If you no longer receive mail, you can use the paper knives as peanut-butter spreaders. Here are a few that any desk would be happy to show off. A gold-plated envelope ripper that doubles as a ruler; its graduated markings in inches are engraved along the edge because don’t you want to measure your Visa bill ($36)? From the late Enzo Mari, the famed Italian product and furniture designer, a sleek twist of shimmering steel that looks as though it might give you the power to cut through stone ($70). If the Ingalls family of “Little House on Prairie” owned a letter opener, it would be hand-forged by one of the blacksmiths at Wicks Forge, a family business that’s been in the metal industry since the nineteen-hundreds, when a Wick worked on the Statue of Liberty. The slender blade, about eight inches long, curls back on itself into a rounded spiral like the swirl of soft-serve ice cream and ends in a leaflike embellishment. It can be personalized with a set of initials, a name, or message, up to ten characters ($30).

“The LSD Marathon” wool blanket 

$270

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Have you been a houseguest for so long your mail’s being forwarded there? In that case, a practical present for your host and you is a blanket or towel. You can’t go wrong at ZigZagZurich, where browsing textiles is second best to viewing an exhibit of modern art. There are lots of Mondrianesque patterns, but also some whimsical scenes such as the wool blanket titled “The LSD Marathon,” which depicts in black and white a bunch of “runners” doing their own thing ($270; in general, blankets are $203-$270; towels and mini-blankets, from $107-$134).

If you’re planning to spill red wine on your host’s white sofa, bringing paper cocktail napkins is a useless but thoughtful gesture. Thematically appropriate would be these retro-styled napkins on which one of the two women, dressed in nineteen-fifties cocktail dresses and sporting nineteen-fifties hairdos, whispers to the other: “Who is this ‘Moderation’ we are supposed to be drinking with?” ($11 for twenty). Another to consider is the nostalgic selection from The New York Review of Books on which there’s an illustration of bookshelves packed with novels ($10 for twenty-five).

How about an assortment of pencils from Kenya? Hand-carved and hand-painted by craftsmen from the Kamba tribe to represent the heads of different safari animals, they could understudy at “Little Lion King” ($49 for a set of five; $74 for ten). If you are giving these to a Gen Z-er or young millennial, I advise bundling the package with a copy of the funny “How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants” ($22). This tongue-in-cheek artisanal guide to sharpening pencils, whose chapters include one on how to break into someone’s house and smash their electric pencil sharpener, was published in 2013, but used copies abound on Amazon as well as used-books purveyors such as Alibris.

Venus soy candle 

$39.99 $33.99

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Maybe the best house present is a house? Interest rates are still high, though, so maybe a candle shaped like a house? Design Within Reach has them on sale for $33, reduced from $55. Hand-painted tapers ($25) and votive candles ($29 for a set of three) from South Africa look as if they’re upholstered in bright, cheerful textiles, heavy on the orange and greens. Each candle is one of a kind. If you learn anything by looking at the candles of Greek gods and goddesses on Etsy, it’s that there must have been a great gym on Mt. Olympus. A buff eight-inch-tall Zeus is $76. Venus is taller (nine inches) and equally fit but goes for less (typical! $40).

You know what’s great about naming something after your host? No gift wrapping. There are more places offering star-naming services than there are stars in the sky, but a reliable one is StarRegistration.com. Depending on the piece of sky you want to occupy, prices range from $60 to $150; constellations are $100. The Cry Me a Cockroach program at the San Antonio Zoo allows you to name a roach or rodent, which will be fed to a zoo dweller at the zoo’s annual benefit on Valentine’s Day. The roach comes with a donation of $10, $25 for a rodent, and there’s a vegetable option for $5. For lonely empty nesters, consider adopting a killer whale on its behalf (tip: a more polite term to use is “orca”). They’re a bargain, by the way: $22 for tons of blubber, plus a photograph, certificate, sticker, and more. Alternatively, you can make someone a honey-bee guardian for $39, or spend $200 and adopt a hive, which your proud friend can visit in Jacksonville, Florida.

What to bring when your host doesn’t tell you to bring nothing? I’ve given a Donald Trump voodoo doll seventy-one times, so I’m beginning to wonder about its effectiveness. Anyway, it makes a good dog toy ($14). A goofy but useful gift is Soylent, the meal replacement chugged by Silicon Valley bros who have no time for luxuries like food (starting at $38 for twelve bottles). Or maybe your host might like a Secret Sharpie that looks and functions like the real thing but comes with a secret compartment that can be used to conceal pills, cash, or state secrets ($10). ♦

In 2018, at a rally in Houston, Donald Trump articulated a distinction that was becoming central to the American right. “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well,” Trump said. This involved “not caring about the country so much.” By contrast, he was “a nationalist.” “Really, we’re not supposed to use that word,” Trump went on. “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word!” The delighted crowd began chanting, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Trump’s use of “nationalist” was perplexing to many people. CNN, in its coverage of the speech, connected it to “the protectionist trade policies he has implemented in an effort to boost domestic manufacturing.” This was reasonable—much of Trump’s speech had centered on his “America First” economic agenda—and yet the idea of being a nationalist was clearly bigger than that. Trump’s nationalism was partly about pride: “For years, you watched as your leaders apologized for America,” he told the audience, and “now you have a President who is standing up for America.” It also involved a generally pugilistic attitude. He wanted to throw America’s weight around. Possibly, he was associating himself with the ambitious, violent nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

We seemed to be hearing only part of the conversation; we didn’t know exactly what he was talking about. And it was strange to consider how Trump, whose mind doesn’t work in isms, had come to be thinking about nationalism in the first place. It was difficult to picture him on Air Force One, gazing out at the passing clouds, then scribbling the word “nationalism” on a notepad and underlining it. What appeared more likely was that some aide or speechwriter had nudged the term up the chain of command until it could be presented to him as a spell to be cast on his audience. (“Use that word!” the adviser might have suggested.) Still, even this scenario was a little hard to credit. “Nationalist” is a nerdy term, associated with history and political science. As a rallying cry, it’s a long way from “Lock her up!” The word “nationalism” had emerged from somewhere—but where?

Broadly speaking, two discourses lurk behind MAGA’s pomp and circumstance. One roars unimpeded through blogs, memes, forums, group texts, Substacks, and chatrooms, while another unfolds at a more stately pace, by means of policy papers, revisionist histories, and conservative political-philosophical manifestos. Often these streams overlap, producing the recognizable MAGA vibe—provocative, emotional, and yet oddly specific. When J. D. Vance told Tucker Carlson that America was run, via the Democrats, by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” it was easy to hear the bro-centric laugh line. What was less obvious was that it was a slur with an intellectual origin, descending from arguments in theology, history, and conservative social theory, and from the very real phenomenon of declining birth rates. Viewed from the right, it was academically respectable.

What should we make of the intellectual aspect of MAGA? Beginning in 2016, Laura K. Field writes, in “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” a group of “PhDs and intellectuals”—“almost all men”—began coalescing around ideas that they attributed to, associated with, or smuggled inside Trump’s nascent movement. To some extent, they liked that he seemingly held the same “old-school conservative views” as they did. But they also saw, in his ideological malleability, a chance to go further. Many “wanted to turn back the clock on pluralistic liberal democracy, and even on modernity itself”; others hoped to advance “visions for the future”—“new laws, schemas for education, modes of constitutionalism, traditionalist communities, and technological utopias.” The result of this fusion was a new brand of conservative futurism.

Having emerged chaotically and opportunistically, the New Right now appears to be at the center of the most dynamic political movement in modern American history. But the role of ideas in politics is complicated. From one perspective, ideas shape political possibilities. (We might hold that, without the Enlightenment, there’d be no French Revolution.) But it’s also true that intellectuals conjure ideas to make sense of what’s already happening. Trump’s unprecedented ascendence was the result of innumerable factors—among them changes in the media, the economy, and American culture—that had little to do with the arguments being made by conservative intellectuals, who were as surprised by Trump as everyone else. By interpreting and justifying his rise, many of those thinkers accessed power; some now work for the federal government, and are putting their ideas into practice. And yet their thinking didn’t create Trump. People didn’t necessarily vote for it. They might not know what it is.

Meanwhile, Trump, now seventy-nine, seems already to be fading; the MAGA movement, at the height of its power, faces the increasingly urgent question of what comes next. If MAGA has good ideas, they might undergird its future. Alternatively, if it has bad or irrelevant ones, it may struggle to maintain its energy. Do the ideas associated with Trumpism lead somewhere, or are they a dead end? Can they stand on their own, without a reality star to animate them?

Field, an academic based in Washington, D.C., was once a conservative, and has a lot of sympathy for various conservative viewpoints. She received an education in the “Great Books,” reading Plato and Rousseau; earned a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin; and has spent plenty of time among the conservative intelligentsia. In the preface to “Furious Minds,” she recounts the beginning of her disillusionment. She was in her fifth year of graduate school, and was attending a prestigious summer program for young scholars at the University of Virginia. At the opening dinner, hosted by a conservative educational organization, she was seated next to one of the program’s senior staffers, a well-liked man she calls Todd, who had recently attended an event where he’d met Michelle Obama, then the First Lady. “She was truly statuesque,” Todd said. “Very tall, very impressive. I’d really like to fuck her.”

Shocked, Field excused herself from the table, went to the restroom, regarded herself in the mirror, and thought, “What on earth am I doing here?” She describes the moment as “the beginning of the long, slow process” of extricating herself from the right. Unnerved by what she perceived as a newly supercharged misogyny among conservative intellectuals—in her view, they are “obsessed with masculinity” in a way their predecessors were not—Field watched as they grew suddenly more radical. In the nineteen-eighties, Ronald Reagan had seen conservatism as a three-legged stool. The basic idea was freedom from government; the legs, Field writes, were social conservatism, free-market economics, and anti-Communism. But now even Reagan was seen as “a great capitulator” in a much larger war. The new conservative thinkers said they wanted a bigger, more assertive government—perhaps even a “Red Caesar”—to overturn atheistic, scientific, multicultural modernity, ushering in a “postliberal” age.

Did this new attitude make sense? There are contradictions involved in using expansive government power to liberate people from the social and political structures they themselves have built. And yet it’s not clear “how much the incoherence of the New Right movement matters in the rough and tumble of real politics,” she writes, in “Furious Minds.” Incoherence could even be part of the point: making an ostentatiously contradictory argument can be a way of demonstrating power and devotion. She quotes the political theorist Matthew McManus, who believes that the New Right counts “a willingness to sublimate and affirm contradiction” as a kind of membership card.

Political life is inevitably disappointing, because all political movements contain contradictions. Democrats consider themselves advocates of the working class, yet their party skews toward the highly educated; old-school Republicans talk up freedom from big government while tolerating the predations of big corporations. Whenever anyone makes an argument about how society should run, they risk being hypocritical, because reality is knotty. So perhaps the contradictions of the New Right are just ordinary.

Field shows how this isn’t the case. The contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique disconnect between thinking and reality. The word “nationalist,” for example, may have snuck into Trump’s lexicon through the wide influence of “The Virtue of Nationalism,” a book published the month before the Houston rally, by the philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony, to conservative acclaim. Its central contention is that the world is a better place when it’s composed of distinct nation-states, each with its own individual culture and history; such societies are more stable, and achieve more, and make unique contributions to humanity as a whole. That’s not unreasonable. But Hazony takes this idea very far. He argues, in abstract terms, that multiculturalism is actually a form of globalist imperialism, aimed at undermining the structure of those nation-states. In his account, there is a black-and-white choice to be made between this so-called imperialism and national sovereignty. Hazony proposes that the concept of national sovereignty, in turn, can be traced back to the struggles of “biblical Israel” to preserve its political independence and religious freedom. So a successful nation-state is actually a theocratic ethnostate, with, as Hazony puts it, “a majority . . . whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.”

Hazony’s conception of nationalism turns out to have been influential within Trumpism; National Conservatism, the movement Hazony helped found, counts Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley among its adherents. There are all sorts of problems with basing one’s idea of nationhood, even loosely, on the case of Israel. But the biggest issue with Hazony’s theory, Field writes, is simply that it is “untethered from the history of the real world.” In fact, many nations have prospered without being so monolithic, and there are shades of nationalism, multiculturalism, and liberalism, which allow countries to thrive without making black-and-white choices. Moreover, it’s simply a fact that the United States contains people from many places, with different cultures and views. There is really no sense in which Hazony-style nationalism can be put into practice here. The signal intellectual error of the New Right, Field says, is that it lets “abstractions smother straightforward real-world truths.” You can’t deport half of America.

The New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas—not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, gender, technology, “the Common Good,” and more. One way to understand this addiction to abstraction, Field writes, is to look at a book like “Ideas Have Consequences,” an “ur-text” of American conservatism published in 1948 by Richard Weaver, an intellectual historian at the University of Chicago. Weaver’s view, Field argues, was that “without a transcendental metaphysics . . . there is nothing to limit political turpitude, and no reason for people to be good and true.” We might doubt this; we might point out that being uncertain about what’s right and wrong definitely doesn’t make you a nihilist. (In fact, the opposite is probably true.) Still, ever since, many conservative intellectuals have been convinced that “moral relativism” is a grave danger to civilization.

If you presume, for whatever reason, that moral uncertainty is nihilism, then you must urgently acquire a transcendent metaphysics. This might mean turning to the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Bible, or to some other source of authority, and asserting that whatever you find there is capital-T Transcendently True. Unfortunately, since we’re stuck in modernity, it’s always possible to disagree about what’s transcendent; it’s also easy to welcome new transcendent abstractions into your pantheon. And so someone like the influential hard-right provocateur Costin Alamariu—known pseudonymously as Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP—can propose an alternative version of ancient history in which men once lived free, during the Bronze Age, but have now become trapped within the cage of “gynocracy.” This view, outlined in the widely read book “Bronze Age Mindset,” is hardly metaphysical. But it can easily be added to a storehouse of abstract ideas that seem, to some people, to be somehow capital-T Transcendently True. (Vance follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.)

It’s small-T true that, today, men face many challenges, among them shifts in the job market and in cultural norms around masculinity. It should be possible to talk about those challenges in straightforward, concrete, real-world terms. But if your head is full of abstractions, it’s tempting to use them. The path from Bronze-Age “gynocracy” to “childless cat ladies” can be quite short, and the presence of the abstract idea can turn concrete questions into what look to be catastrophic crises of value. Reality doesn’t matter; abstractions do. And yet how many Trump voters care about the same abstractions as the New Right intellectuals? How many just want cheaper groceries, vacant apartments, and decent jobs?

A common thread throughout “Furious Minds” is the frequency with which the New Right simply asserts truths in eternal terms, without justification or argument, and the satisfaction it takes in doing so. These supposed truths, once asserted, serve as justification for more assertions, creating a performance of certainty about what’s True. And yet this performance quickly outpaces what’s actually self-evident. The legal scholar, political theorist, and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt held that there’s a “state of exception” during which a leader can, and perhaps must, circumvent the constitutional order so that he can save the nation; some on the New Right have merged this idea with the notion of “Caesarism,” arguing that the country needs a “Red Caesar.” (“If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be?” Michael Anton—who would go on to help author Project 2025—asked, in 2016.) But is a “state of exception” a real thing? Even if it is—are we in one? Do voters believe in this stuff—or even know about it? The New Right acts as though it’s all perfectly obvious. (“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” Schmitt wrote, in 1922. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump posted on social media this year.)

It’s no surprise to find that the intellectual fabric of Trumpism is thin. What is possibly surprising is the degree to which the New Right has, through its arguments and behavior, refuted its own premises. In 2019, in a celebrated joint essay called “Against the Dead Consensus,” a group of conservative thinkers argued that liberalism and “consensus conservatism”—the old-school kind—had “long ago ceased to inquire into the first things”; it had taken for granted erroneous conclusions about “the nature and purpose of our common life.” They promised to turn America into the kind of place where values were taken seriously—where we might ask, for example, whether “the soulless society of individual affluence” was one we wanted. But it turns out that it’s liberalism that forces you to inquire into ideas, precisely because they’re uncertain, changeable, and contested. In the illiberal world created by Trumpism, you don’t have to ask—you can just proclaim. You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all. ♦

The Alice Austen House is a Victorian Gothic cottage on the Staten Island waterfront, and on the summery fall day that I visited, the view over the harbor was bright and blue. Inside, the air smelled like salt water, which suited the current exhibition: “She Sells Seashells,” curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an exploration of work by queer women artists who have found freedom and community at the seashore.

Alice Austen was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographer who spent most of her life on this particular piece of shoreline, first with her family and later with her partner, Gertrude Tate. An undated beach photograph of hers shows three women perched along the edge of the waves, exhilaration visible in their posture even as their faces are turned from the camera. Her work, which is interspersed throughout the exhibition, suggests a quietly insistent lineage for the more forthright work on view by artists of recent decades. In Austen’s 1885 photograph “Group in Bathing Costumes,” five women pose in jaunty bloomers and knee-length tunics, showing significantly less skin but just as much spirited self-possession as the nude cartoon amazons splashing around in Ana Benaroya’s 2022 drawing “By the Ocean’s Roar.” Rolls-Bentley, in her introduction to the show, writes that the contemporary works “converse” with Austen’s, “weaving personal histories and collective memory into a shore-bound archive of desire, care, possibility, and renewal.”

The Alice Austen House was originally a seventeenth-century Dutch structure, which Austen’s mother’s wealthy family remodelled over time into a retreat from Manhattan. They named it Clear Comfort. Alice grew up there amid both privilege and unconventional circumstances: shortly after her birth, her father abandoned his wife and child, leading them to move in with her mother’s family. Clear Comfort was where Alice, as the adored only child in a house full of adults, learned to take photographs. An uncle brought home a camera and taught her how to use it; upstairs, in a darkroom the size of a linen closet, she developed her pictures.

Photography was not an unusual hobby for a young woman of her milieu, and many of Austen’s early images depict a world of genteel Victorian amusements—parties gathered on porches and scenic overlooks, happy pugs, sunny days in leg-of-mutton sleeves. (She also produced a wealth of documentary photos, depicting “Street Types of New York” and the quarantine station on Ellis Island, a body of work that distinguishes her as one of the first female photographers to work outside of the studio.) But the pictures that have won Austen a small cult following are altogether more intimate and surprising. For example: Austen and two of her female friends dressed in men’s clothes and fake mustaches, mugging and laughing; Austen, again with two female friends, all in bed together, arms tossed behind their heads; and—perhaps most memorably—Austen and another woman, their long hair loose, wearing white undergarments and small white masks, standing with cigarettes in their mouths and faces close.

These photos are gathered at the Alice Austen House on a wall labelled “The Larky Life,” the photographer’s term for leisure pursuits more generally. The social world seen through her lens—women riding bicycles, women playing tennis, women embracing one another—has an irresistible vividness. It’s easy to imagine that world repurposed for one of those TV series where young people in corsets have spunky adventures set to ahistorical pop music, like “Dickinson” or “The Buccaneers.” There have, in fact, been at least two Y.A. books centered on Austen: one, “Renegade Girls,” by Nora Neus, is a graphic novel about queer romance set in the photographer’s day; the other, “Alice Austen Lived Here,” by Alex Gino, is a story about contemporary queer teens discovering her work. (The curator Bonnie Yochelson’s Austen biography, published earlier this year, bears the wry title “Too Good to Get Married.”) The museum embraces the sense of personal connection its subject inspires. “To do this job well, you have to love Alice,” the executive director, Victoria Munro, told me. Austen herself remains a bit of a cipher: her own letters have been lost, making examples of her voice scarce. But surviving correspondence from her friends suggests the contours of someone who knew how to have a good time. One friend, impatient for Austen to join her on vacation upstate, writes to describe the kind of high jinks that await: “I never laughed so hard in all my life. I was the only girl and such singing and yelling I never heard before . . . You had better bring your banjo along.” (In 2022, the letters were the basis for a podcast called “My Dear Alice,” produced by the artist Pamela Bannos in collaboration with the Alice Austen House.)

“She must have been a boss,” Munro said, as we considered the “Larky Life” wall. “She had to talk her friends into all these poses.” It was a good point: social strictures aside, Austen had the period’s technical constraints to consider. She worked with a bulky wooden box camera that could weigh as much as fifty pounds when fully equipped, and Munro estimated that an indoor photo like the masked tableau would have required its subjects to hold still for an exposure of thirty seconds to a minute. Taking a racy photo demanded commitment.

Austen’s trajectory, like that of many artists in New York, finally hinged on the vicissitudes of real estate. At Clear Comfort, she built an existence of remarkable self-determination—for thirty years, she lived there alongside Tate, with whom she’d fallen in love during a vacation in the Catskills. (One giddy series of photos depicts a young Tate dancing outside in the sun.) But Austen’s family money was lost in the crash of 1929, and she and Tate, after struggling to support themselves, were obliged to sell off many of their possessions—including a collection of shells, lending a bittersweet edge to the current show’s title. In 1944, they sold the house. Tate eventually moved in with her family, who rejected Austen; Austen moved to the Staten Island Farm Colony, a pauper’s hospital.

Alice Austen (left) and Gertrude Tate, at Pickards Penny Photo Studio, in Stapleton, Staten Island.

A former Life magazine writer rediscovered Austen’s work in 1951, and a new surge of interest and support restored her to a measure of ease, before her death in 1952. Clear Comfort was preserved thanks to the efforts of Austen’s new fans (including the photographer Berenice Abbott). It operated for a time as a fairly conventional historic-house museum: the roped-off rooms held an assortment of roughly period furniture, with little that was specific to Austen’s life there. The house’s official accounts elided her relationship with Tate, inspiring the activist group the Lesbian Avengers to stage a protest outside of it in the nineties. In 2017, though, it was named a National L.G.B.T.Q. Historic Site, and today it foregrounds Tate as an essential part of Austen’s story.

It’s a challenging time to be running a museum, especially one with an identitarian bent. “Everyone is hurting,” Munro told me. “Everyone has experienced cuts and deficits.” (Even Trump’s tariffs were making their presence felt. A piece in the current show shipped from abroad—a cyanotype pillowcase covering a speaker that played ocean sounds, by the artist SHARP—had gotten stuck in New Jersey awaiting payment.) But not all recent changes have been unwelcome. Near the end of her life, Austen gave many of her photographs to the Staten Island Historical Society; this year, they have finally been returned to the museum’s own collection, providing an enormous new cache of material to catalogue and digitize. Munro was holding onto an energized sense of purpose. “Leading with joy in this moment feels like a rebellion,” she said.

Civilization outlasts humanity in the new sci-fi drama “Pluribus.” On the night that the world as we know it is destroyed, a novelist named Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) sees cars and planes veer off course, an emergency room full of convulsing bodies, and her city, Albuquerque, on fire. The President dies under mysterious circumstances, and, more devastatingly for Carol, so does her live-in partner, Helen (Miriam Shor). Then, in less than an hour, the apocalypse cleans up after itself. People stop convulsing. They put out the fires. Granted, they’ve been hijacked by an extraterrestrial virus—but, when they move to retrieve Helen’s body and Carol tearfully protests, they listen. “We just want to help, Carol,” they say, in unison. Not since “The Twilight Zone,” when aliens arrived promising “to serve man,” have the end times come in such obliging fashion.

“Pluribus” is Vince Gilligan’s much anticipated follow-up to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” in which Seehorn co-starred as the straitlaced lawyer Kim Wexler. The new series shares other elements with its predecessors, including the New Mexico backdrop, but for longtime Gilligan fans like myself it feels more like a callback to his first TV job, as a writer and eventual executive producer on the paranormal procedural “The X-Files.” That show, which centered on the F.B.I. agents Mulder and Scully’s investigations of unexplained phenomena, first revealed Gilligan’s preoccupation and playfulness with notions of order and chaos. He made his directorial début with the episode “Je Souhaite,” in which Mulder stumbles upon a genie and dutifully wishes for world peace—only for the smirking spirit to wipe out mankind. “Pluribus” turns on a version of the same trade-off: the destruction of our species, however ruinous for Carol, might just be the best thing for the rest of the planet.

As we learn in Episode 2, nearly a billion people died on the same day Helen did. Those who survived—all except Carol and a dozen others scattered around the globe—have been integrated into a single being, bound by a “psychic glue” that allows unfettered access to the thoughts and memories of the entire collective. When Carol speaks to anyone with the virus, she is technically speaking to pretty much everyone else on Earth. The word “I” approaches extinction, since the mass speaks as a “we.” They differentiate themselves only for her comfort, beginning interactions with a cheerful download on the host she’s addressing: “This individual went by Lawrence J. Kless, or Larry.” Though Carol appears inexplicably immune, they’re amiable and keen to bring her into the fold as soon as they can figure out how. Their Stepford smiles take her back to the last time she was surrounded by upbeat strangers bent on changing her—as a teen-ager at a conversion camp. But her new keepers are welcoming of all sexualities; an uninfected Mauritian man named Koumba (Samba Schutte) notes that racism is also a nonissue. Carol’s reflexive resistance in the face of a peaceful, practically frictionless society becomes the animating principle of the show: What if everyone else’s paradise is your personal hell?

Even before her fellow-humans’ contamination, Carol didn’t seem to have much use for them. She spent her days churning out best-selling romances that she deemed “mindless crap” and harbored a corresponding contempt for her fans, hiding both her queerness and her more serious literary ambitions in a bid for broader appeal. A certified misanthrope, she makes no attempt to check in on friends or family after the initial catastrophe; Helen aside, it’s not clear whether she has any. Most of the other survivors she meets have a loved one or two in tow—though it’s hard to say how close those relatives are to their pre-viral selves—and a surprising openness to the new normal. Carol is assigned a liaison from the hive mind, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), an unfailingly polite and stubbornly uninteresting woman who uses the wealth of information at her disposal to try to mollify her unhappy charge.

In the early episodes, the mass is a potent metaphor for artificial intelligence. It is destructive but solicitous, well informed but dumb as hell. When Carol sarcastically tells Zosia that the only thing that would improve her situation is a grenade in her hand, they have one delivered to her home forthwith. Ever eager to please, they tell Carol that her writing and Shakespeare’s are “equally wonderful.” And they’re just as happy to comply with baser desires. Koumba uses them like a concierge service, commandeering Air Force One to jet-set around the world, waited on all the while by a retinue of babes in leopard print. Zosia says that they don’t mind his sleaze: “For us, affection is always welcome.” Gilligan has said that the show was conceived about a decade ago, before A.I. became a widely adopted consumer technology. Still, the end credits state, pointedly, “This show was made by humans.”

Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter—and stranger—outing than his two previous series. (For all that “Pluribus” delights in eerie atmospherics, the Southwestern sunniness keeps things from getting too dark.) The uncanny scenarios he conjures are a source of humor, intrigue, and genuine unease. But the show never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Carol makes for a maddeningly tunnel-visioned protagonist—one with a shocking lack of curiosity about the entity that’s overtaken the Earth, or even about what the infected do all day when they’re not offering to cater to her whims. Her one-note sullenness means that Seehorn, who was heartbreaking as the repressed Kim on “Saul,” is squandered as the lead of her own show. The contentment and coöperativeness of the hive mind are similarly tough to dramatize.

The invaders’ “biological imperative” to absorb everything around them is “Pluribus” ’s chief source of tension: Will Carol, who takes stabs at defiance but has none of the requisite skills, find a cure before she’s subsumed? But the “joining,” as Zosia calls it, could take weeks or even months, and the lack of narrative urgency is intensified by drawn-out sequences of time-consuming toil. In the pilot, Carol struggles to load Helen’s collapsed body onto a truck bed to take her to the hospital; later, it’s another arduous undertaking to dig a hole deep enough to bury her in their back yard. Such displays of trial and error were a revelation on “Breaking Bad,” when Walter White’s flailing sold the challenges that he faced in transforming himself from an unassuming chemistry teacher into a ruthless drug lord. (No one just knows how to get rid of a dead body.) On the new show, Carol, facing down layers of volcanic rock and a likely case of heatstroke, eventually has to accept Zosia’s help with Helen’s burial. The concession should feel significant, not least because Zosia was sent by the collective for her resemblance to the love interest in Carol’s novels: a fantasy to replace the real woman she’d lost. Yet Seehorn and Wydra’s interactions are more stilted than charged.

I’m aware that this is the kind of series we should feel lucky to have at this disheartening juncture in television. One of the medium’s great auteurs has created something wholly original and impressively unpredictable, with the mass gradually revealing vulnerabilities that feel truly unique in science fiction. But its otherworldliness also means that the show has difficulty developing Carol’s relationship with Zosia—or anyone else—in a meaningful way. As the nine-part season chugs along, the entity becomes less of a character than a puzzle to solve. The A.I. analogy gives way to something much less satisfying: a horror story about what their version of living in harmony would really entail. Carol, blinkered though she may be, could have called that from the start. As she grouses at the outset, “Nobody sane is that happy.” ♦

When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe.

Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.

On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at seven-oh-five in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia. “It’s not leukemia,” I told George. “What are they talking about?”

George, who was then a urology resident at the hospital, began calling friends who were primary-care doctors and ob-gyns. Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia. My parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, had brought my two-year-old son to the hospital to meet his sister, but suddenly I was being moved to another floor. My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away.

The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly—I had just turned thirty-four.

I could not be cured by a standard course of treatment. I would need a few months, at least, of chemotherapy, which would aim to reduce the number of blast cells in my bone marrow. (Blast cells are immature blood cells; a high count can be a sign of leukemia.) Then I would need a bone-marrow transplant, which could cure me. After the transplant, I would probably need more chemotherapy, on a regular basis, to try and prevent the cancer from returning.

I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River—eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-county race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.

Schlossberg reporting off the coast of Santa Barbara in 2022.Photograph by Lauren Justice

I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn’t know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort.

There were indignities and humiliations. I had a postpartum hemorrhage and almost bled to death, before being saved by my obstetrician. (She had already saved my life once, by noticing my blood count and giving me the chance to be cured. This time felt like overkill.) Little things made it easier, or somehow made it feel like everything was going to be fine. My son came to visit almost every day. When friends heard that I liked Spindrift seltzer, they sent cases of it; they also sent pajamas and watercolor kits and good gossip. People made paintings and drawings to decorate my walls. They dropped off food at my parents’ apartment, where George and the kids had moved. The nurses brought me warm blankets and let me sit on the floor of the skyway with my son, even though I wasn’t supposed to leave my room. They ate up the gossip that I gathered; they looked the other way when they saw that I had a contraband teakettle and toaster. They told me about their kids and their dating lives and their first trips to Europe. I have never encountered a group of people who are more competent, more full of grace and empathy, more willing to serve others than nurses. Nurses should take over.

Eventually, my blast-cell count went down and I was allowed to do a round of treatment at home, with my family. My care was transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the largest centers for bone-marrow transplants in the country. Whenever I needed to be back in the hospital, my oncologist visited me almost daily, talking about my disease, of course, but also about foxhunting, who was annoying me that week, his new cat. He’s Orthodox Jewish and observes the Sabbath, but he would still answer texts that I rudely sent on Saturdays. He has scoured every inch of the earth for more treatments for me; he knows I don’t want to die and he is trying to stop it. My transplant doctor, always in a bow tie, always shouting a big hello, is a mad scientist in disguise as one of the country’s foremost experts on bone-marrow transplants, who safely got me through a lung infection and didn’t bat an eye when I pulled out a rosary and a bottle of holy water, blessed by Pope Francis and sent from Rome. He looked at me and said, “Vaya con Dios. Go with God.”

After the at-home chemo, I was admitted to M.S.K. for an even stronger dose of poison. Then I was ready for a transplant. My sister had turned out to be a match and would donate her stem cells. (My brother was a half-match, but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case.) My sister held her arms straight for hours as the doctors drained blood from one, scooped out and froze her stem cells, and pumped the blood back in the other.

The cells smelled like canned tomato soup. When the transfusion began, I sneezed twelve times and threw up. Then I waited—for my blood counts to recover, for my sister’s cells to heal and change my body. We wondered if I would get her banana allergy or her personality. My hair started to fall out and I wore scarves to cover my head, remembering, vainly, each time I tied one on, how great my hair used to be; when my son came to visit, he wore them, too. After a few days, I couldn’t speak or swallow because of sores in my mouth; food turned to dust on my tongue.

George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital; he didn’t get mad when I was raging on steroids and yelled at him that I did not like Schweppes ginger ale, only Canada Dry. He would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner. I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.

My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

I went home after fifty days at Memorial Sloan Kettering. The transplant had put me in remission, but I had no immune system, and would have to get all my childhood vaccines again. I started a new round of chemotherapy to keep the cancer at bay. I relapsed. My transplant doctor said that leukemia with my mutation “liked to come back.”

In January, I joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy that has proved effective against certain blood cancers. Scientists would engineer my sister’s T-cells, directing them to attack my cancer cells. It was dark all the time outside my hospital window. I was given more chemotherapy; after the CAR-T treatment, I had cytokine-release syndrome, in which a storm of inflammation left me unable to breathe without high-flow oxygen. My lungs filled with fluid and my liver was unhappy and I was constantly on the brink of going to the I.C.U. A few weeks later, I was in remission again, though I had lost about twenty pounds. The doctors were happy with the results: I had done better than several other patients in the trial, which beggared belief, but I went home.

It didn’t really feel as if I was home: I had to go to the outpatient clinic most days, to treat infections or receive transfusions, sitting in a recliner for hours on end, waiting to know when I would need to go back to the hospital. In early April, I did go back, on just a few days’ notice, for my second transplant. I hoped that this would work. Actually, I decided that it would work. I dutifully copied Seamus Heaney poems into my notebook: “The Cure at Troy” (“Believe that a further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles / And cures and healing wells.”) and “The Gravel Walks” (“So walk on air against your better judgement”). I tried to be the perfect patient: if I did everything right, if I was nice to everyone all the time, if I didn’t need any help or have any problems, then it would work.

This time, I had an unrelated donor, the logic being that the cells would be distinct from those of my sister and me, and thus better suited to take on the cancer. All I know about the donor is that he is a man in his twenties from the Pacific Northwest. I imagined a Portland woodcutter or a Seattle tech bro. Either way, I wished I could thank him. I went into remission again; I relapsed again. I joined another clinical trial. I was hospitalized twice more—weeks I don’t remember, during which I lost another ten pounds. First, I had graft-versus-host disease, in which new cells attack old ones, and then, in late September, I was downed by a form of Epstein-Barr virus that blasted my kidneys. When I got home a few weeks later, I had to learn how to walk again and couldn’t pick up my children. My leg muscles wasted and my arms seemed whittled into bone.

During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.

Schlossberg and George Moran at their wedding-rehearsal dinner, in 2017.Photograph by Elizabeth Cecil

Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.

In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to “let Bobby go wild” on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.

Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.) If George changed jobs, we didn’t know if we’d be able to get insurance, now that I had a preëxisting condition. Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. Bobby has said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.

As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion, which, at Bobby’s urging, is currently “under review” by the Food and Drug Administration. I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve.

My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans—their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut.

I won’t write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.

When I look at him, I try to fill my brain with memories. How many more times can I watch the video of him trying to say “Anna Karenina”? What about when I told him I didn’t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, and he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, “I hear you, buddy, I hear you”? I think about the first time I came home from the hospital. He walked into my bathroom, looked at me, and said, “It’s so nice to meet you in here.”

Then there’s my daughter, her curly red hair like a flame, squinting her eyes and grinning a gap-toothed grin after taking a sip of seltzer. She stomps around the house in bright-yellow rain boots, pretending to talk on my mother’s phone, a string of fake pearls around her neck, no pants, giggling and running away from anyone who tries to catch her. She asks us to play James Brown’s “I Got the Feelin’ ” by picking up a portable speaker and saying, “Baby, baby.”

Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember. ♦

Tatiana Schlossberg at her parents’ home in New York City.Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker

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The Washington Roundtable reflects on the first year since Donald Trump’s second win, before a live audience at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, on November 20th. The panel considers how cracks in the MAGA firmament may shape what’s next for the President and the Republican party. “American politics the last ten years have been dominated by this very singular disruptive figure of Donald Trump,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. “So what we define as the new abnormal, for a whole generation of Americans is, in fact, the new normal.”

This week’s reading:

“Dick Cheney’s Long, Strange Goodbye,” by Susan B. Glasser

“The Darkest Thread in the Epstein E-mails,” by Jessica Winter

“The Meaning of Trump’s Presidential Pardons,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

“Kash Patel’s Acts of Service,” by Marc Fisher

“How M.B.S. Won Back Washington,” by Isaac Chotiner

“Donald Trump Can’t Dodge the Costly K-Shaped Economy,” by John Cassidy

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.